Fall 2016

California School Facilities Spending

The majority of school districts in California do not meet minimum annual facility expenditure benchmarks, even—in many cases—with state funding.

Between 2008 and 2012, at least 57% of districts did not meet industry benchmarks for spending on capital renewals and more than 60% failed to meet the benchmark for basic maintenance and operations.

In many cases, the same school districts are falling behind on both measures.

Project Design

  • This project required lots of data cleaning and merging. I used Stata for some of the data cleaning before merging datasets in R.
  • Choroplethr provided the basis for understanding where and how much spending is going towards public school facilities.
  • Leaflet enabled me to include pop-ups for interactive maps that show specifics about each California county.

Leaflet: Assessed Value Per Student Interactive Map

Leaflet: FRPM Interactive Map by County

Leaflet: Maintenance & Operations Spending Gap by County

Next Steps

  • There are still some flaws in the code (ie. on the Assessed Value leaflet map, I have no idea where those values are coming from; and similarly for the Benchmark Spending)
  • I want to add more layers to the leaflet maps including which counties passed bond measures in 2016 for school infrastructure.
  • I couldn't get the Choropleth maps to knit into this HTML, so I decided to remove them. However, I think they can be rather helpful (even though I prefer the Leaflet maps)